Teapot basher who fought to have his sentence reduced instead has it increased

A man who won a bid to quash his jail sentence after he bashed his terminally ill partner with a teapot and split her abdominal wound has had his punishment reassessed.

A MAN who bashed his terminally ill girlfriend – until her bowel protruded from her hysterectomy wound – has copped more jail time in an ironic twist after he successfully fought to have his initial sentence quashed.

Leigh John Parker, 56, struck the woman’s head with her mother’s teapot, just months after she had been diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer, at their Murdunna home in September 2017.

At the time, Parker was the woman’s carer after being released from jail for unrelated offending.

He also pushed the 53-year-old woman, with her fall causing a surgical wound from weeks earlier to split open.

Parker told a neighbour her “guts were hanging out” as she lay unconscious in the driveway, collapsing after she had tried to run away.

Parker called triple-0 and put a blanket on the woman before asking the neighbour for a cigarette, saying he thought the victim was dead.

Parker was initially sentenced to four years and three months jail, with a non-parole period of two years and nine months, but successfully appealed in October this year and had the sentence quashed.

The Court of Appeal accepted his argument the facts had not been resolved before he was jailed, with the judge overlooking Parker’s version of what happened that night.

But on Wednesday, Chief Justice Alan Blow said he was not convinced Parker acted in self-defence when he pushed the woman after she had allegedly bitten his ear – despite having just removed her false teeth.

He also found the victim, who fled to Western Australia after the attack, was “more vulnerable on the night in question than I had understood”.

Chief Justice Blow also attached less weight to Parker’s guilty plea, who confessed to two counts of assault following a plea deal downgrading one of the charges from grievous bodily harm, given the distressed woman was not spared the “ordeal” of giving evidence.

The judge also noted Parker attacked despite knowing she had an abdominal hernia that couldn’t be operated on until she finished chemotherapy.

However, he sentenced Parker on the basis he did not intend or foresee such “serious harm”.

He subsequently increased the head sentence to four years and six months’ jail, but fixed the same non-parole period.

The woman fled Tasmania after being taken to the Royal Hobart Hospital by ambulance, undergoing an emergency laparotomy and receiving nine staples in her head from the teapot wound.

She is now in palliative care with post traumatic stress disorder.